Ask yourself: How do I

Figure Out What Creates

First, you say:
Define what success means, all those dreams slipping through your fingers.
Imagine you’re the CEO of your own heartbeat, the board of directors huddled
behind your eyes. You carry charts and metrics in your rib cage.
You say: I want a purpose that sings in my blood. I want to stop wasting time.
You’re standing in your kitchen, pen in hand, 2AM. There’s a war going on
in your head—stakeholders and profits, legacy and longing.
Yes, longing like a broken violin string. The music that never made it to the page.

You write purpose on a sticky note. You peel it off. You keep going.
Name your gifts, your secret devotions. Name the things you love too much to speak aloud.
The world spins outside your window: shiny, blinding.
You ask, “What’s my core value?” and the world replies, “Keep looking.”
You need something you can trust. Find it in the hush of early morning,
find it in the conversation you never finished with your father,
the memory that knocks you flat at the grocery store. Wrap your purpose in strong arms.
You do not need permission to matter. You already do.

Next step: Envision your life five, ten years out. Let it taste like ripe fruit,
like the first bite of bread after a long fast. Imagine them talking about you,
saying, She lived like it counted, he made a home in the strangest places.
You think of newspaper headlines that say: YOU ARE ENOUGH.
You think of another headline: GET UP. KEEP GOING.
Imagine a life so full you can see its shape like a mountain range in the dark.
You know it’s there even when you close your eyes.

Now hold your days in your hands. All 168 hours, the grains of salt and sugar.
Slice them into small units—significant other, family, friends, body, mind, and so on,
like rearranging furniture to see how the light falls differently at dawn.
Map them out. Assign numbers: importance, satisfaction.
A weird sort of math, but this is your empire of meaning, your attempt at a blueprint.
Some bubbles rise to the surface: this is critical, that one’s only half-loved.
You cross out what doesn’t hum. You highlight what aches sweetly in your chest.
You circle the places that beg for more attention, the hungry corners.

This is the part where you learn from other lives: role models, ghosts,
people with hands open and patient, people who built temples from dust.
Science says relationships matter, love matters, kindness matters, health matters—
the old truths arrive again, like birds returning to a quiet pond.
None of this is new, but it feels new when applied to your particular softness.
Your body is both fragile and fierce, like a hummingbird inside a glass case.
Set it free. Let it sing.

Then you choose. This is where it gets hard. There’s no single right answer.
You say: I’ll spend less time scrolling my life away. I’ll call my grandmother. I’ll run at dawn.
I’ll breathe through the difficult truths. Maybe start a business,
maybe learn a language that tastes like honey on my tongue.
You convert your revelations into something tangible.
You force them into actions, into hours of the day, like loading a ship with cargo.
It’s not just theory, it’s living. Taste how the air changes when you commit.

Finally, anchor it. Tie it down so it won’t drift.
Announce to a friend: I will become who I said I’d be. Measure your progress.
If you fail, say it’s part of the story. If you soar, breathe it in.
Check yourself weekly. Adjust, reinvent, like a sculptor chipping away at stone.
You are making something human-shaped and luminous.
Your life is not static. It’s fluid, alive, and feral.
Put the final version on a single page, tack it to the fridge.
Let it whisper back to you: Here I am. Here you are.

Remember, there’s no perfect formula. There is only you, the world,
and the choices you carry in the chambers of your heart.
In the end, what matters is this: you decided to live deliberately.
You took your life in both hands and said, Here’s where we go next.
And if you stumble, if you fall to your knees, that’s just another line in the story,
another mark on the chart, another pivot in the plan. You are still you.
Still rewriting, still risking beauty. Still making music out of air.